The Wix Blog group develops one of our most popular products from the city of Vilnius, and with team members from Lithuania, Spain, France, Portugal and the U.S, it has an international feel to it
Wix’s Blog group - one of our most popular products with millions of users - is based almost entirely in Vilnius, Lithuania. Currently it’s about 30 members, and it’s growing fast.
Simonas Maciulis, one of our UX/UI Product Designers says that the reason he loves working at Wix blog is because there’s a sense of ownership in the working culture. “Even though we belong to a big international company, at Wix Blog we work in a small independent team where we own the product and can shape it with our knowledge and ideas”.
Mario Banares Colastra, a Product Manager for Wix Blog, is all about tech (as you’ll easily notice in a bit), but says that working in Vilnius also makes him happy. “I’m a Spaniard who used to live in Finland, so I’m gradually moving to the south”, he laughs. “Our team is very international and we have people from all over the world - Lithuania, Spain, France, Portugal and even from the U.S state of Hawaii. We work hard but we also have tons of fun”.
Mario says that what inspires him the most about what he does is the impact the product he helps to develop has on millions of Wix users. “The Wix Blog enables people to spread inspiring ideas and help them engage with millions of readers. One of our most successful blog posts was about the Coronavirus reaching more than 15 million views in just a few days”.
Milda Glebauskaite, one of the group's Backend Developers, explains that the Wix Blog has transformed dramatically in the last few years thanks to continuous innovation of features and the user experience that the team has developed, becoming a great tool for SEO - an ever-present user need. “The Wix Blog is a really interesting and challenging product to work on. We are one of the few teams that uses both of our main stacks, Node.JS and Scala. We are the full owners of our development cycle and it really drives us to write scalable and resilient systems”.
The Great Migration
The Blog group’s biggest challenge in the last few years - migrating millions of Wix Blog users from the older platform to the feature-rich environment of the brand new Blog - has rolled out recently.
“Just last week Milda told us that she wrote the first line of code for the migration in February 2018”, Mario says. “It was a process of continuous learning and listening to our users. I think it was one of the biggest migrations ever made and also the most challenging because we had to make it pixel-perfect. We had unbelievable amounts of data on our users’ blogs - and we couldn’t afford any losses anywhere. It was a very complex project that took us a long time to complete, but when you have a great team behind you, you know that everything’s going to be okay. Everyone at Wix is really good at what they do, and people here take ownership which is something I haven’t experienced in other workplaces. You can completely trust your team members”.
And how’s the user feedback so far?
“Think of an app that you use everyday that changes dramatically. It takes you a few days to get used to it, right? Buttons are not in the same place and it might feel weird because you can’t find them, but later on during the day you discover new features and realize that things work much better. I’d say that 99% of the users are happy with the changes we’ve made. We now have better functionality and the performance is much better so everyone is happy that their blog loads much faster.”
What will be the challenges new team members should expect?
“We’re a mature product now and we’re in a good position to take over the competition because the whole of Wix is behind us. We’re going to add very complex features and move to the next level and we’ll offer our users things that aren’t considered by default blogging features such as the ability to have a multilingual blog. We’re very innovative”.
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